Book Image

CMake Best Practices

By : Dominik Berner, Mustafa Kemal Gilor
5 (2)
Book Image

CMake Best Practices

5 (2)
By: Dominik Berner, Mustafa Kemal Gilor

Overview of this book

CMake is a powerful tool used to perform a wide variety of tasks, so finding a good starting point for learning CMake is difficult. This book cuts to the core and covers the most common tasks that can be accomplished with CMake without taking an academic approach. While the CMake documentation is comprehensive, it is often hard to find good examples of how things fit together, especially since there are lots of dirty hacks and obsolete solutions available on the internet. This book focuses on helping you to tie things together and create clean and maintainable projects with CMake. You'll not only get to grips with the basics but also work through real-world examples of structuring large and complex maintainable projects and creating builds that run in any programming environment. You'll understand the steps to integrate and automate various tools for improving the overall software quality, such as testing frameworks, fuzzers, and automatic generation of documentation. And since writing code is only half of the work, the book also guides you in creating installers and packaging and distributing your software. All this is tailored to modern development workflows that make heavy use of CI/CD infrastructure. By the end of this CMake book, you'll be able to set up and maintain complex software projects using CMake in the best way possible.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
1
Part 1: The Basics
5
Part 2: Practical CMake – Getting Your Hands Dirty with CMake
14
Part 3: Mastering the Details

Optimizing build performance

Apart from raw compilation time, the main driver for long build times in C++ projects is often unnecessary dependencies between the targets or files. If targets have unnecessary linking requirements between each other, the build system will be limited in executing build tasks in parallel and some of the targets will be frequently relinked. Creating a dependency graph of the targets, as described in Chapter 6, Automatically Generating Documentation, will help identify the dependencies. If the resulting graph looks more like a snarl of rope than a tree, optimizing and refactoring the project structure might bring a lot of performance gains. Tools such as include what you use and link what you use, as described in Chapter 7, Seamlessly Integrating Code Quality Tools with CMake, may further help identify unnecessary dependencies. Another common theme is C or C++ projects that expose too much private information in public headers, often causing frequent rebuilds...